Week Two Highlights and Plateaus

Our second week of study was better than the first. I felt as if the rust was shaken off and I was really diving in to the book I was studying. That being said, I was beginning to believe something I had heard from English to Chinese learners: the mythical plateaus.

To plateau is a leveling off of progress. There is obvious progress when it comes to learning new vocabulary and grammar structures, but this sort of plateau is in terms of overall fluency.

In my opinion the first several months of Chinese study can be categorized as the Baby stage. You learn sporadic vocab and can spit it out appropriately on occasion. Speaking with other Chinese speakers is minimal.

Once you break through this level, and establish a certain level of fluency, at least in my experience, there is a great deal of relief. You can flex your language muscles a bit in conversation, and understand passing dialogues between native speakers. You can impress people. It feels good.

But after this first burst of confidence, you may find, as I have, that while you learn the new vocab and grammar structures, and can use them at will, the overall fluency and confidence just isn't there yet. At any rate, this realization compelled me to study even harder, and, more importantly, speak more with my Chinese friends and teachers. Here's to busting through another plateau...eventually.

In our second official week, we had a little more discretion when it came to spending time outside of class, since CLI gave us fewer activities. The ones that they did give us, were great. My personal favorites were the Calligraphy and Chinese painting classes. As any of you who know me on a personal level are already aware, I am not an artist. I went into these sessions with this in mind, yet still applied myself and tried to create something beautiful, lasting, and breathtaking. I wanted to create art. Well, this is what I came up with:

Close enough right? Another cool activity was visiting a local private elementary school where they taught in Mandarin and English concurrently. Chinese parents are obsessed with giving their children an early advantage when it comes to early education, and look for anyway up in China's now competitive educational environment. This school was one such place. The kids did not seem to mind all the pressure and expectations surrounding them, and were happy and goofy, just like kids should be. It was a real pleasure to meet some of them and see how they studied.

After the week of studying we began preparing for our second weekend excursion to the rural town of Longsheng...